will combine their Horse, Line, and Field Batteries in a common cause
and against a common enemy; the Saint, the Politician, and the Butterfly
have several rallying-points in common, and when it comes to the
question of extinguishing an ineligible, of combining a sneer with a
smile, of blending the unexceptionably-courteous with the
indescribably-contemptuous, of calmly shutting their doors to those who
won't aggrandize them, and blandly throwing them open to those who will,
it would be an invidious task to give the golden apple, and decide which
of the three ladies most distinguishes herself in such social prowess.
Need I say that I _don't_ see very much of them?--severe strictures on
society in general, with moral platitudes, over the luncheon wines at
Lady Marechale's; discourse redolent of blue-books, with vindictive
hits at Protocol and myself for our disinclination to accept a
"mission," and our levity of life and opinions at "a period so full of
social revolutions and wide-spread agitation as the present," through
the soup and fish at Agneta's; softly hissed acerbities and languidly
yawned satires on the prettiest women of my acquaintance, over the
coffee at Lady Frederic's; are none of them particularly inviting or
alluring. And as they or similar conversational confections are
invariably included in each of the three ladies' entertainments _en
petit comite_, it isn't wonderful if I forswear their drawing-rooms.
Cheres dames, you complain, and your chosen defenders for you, that men
don't affect your society nowadays save and except when making love to
you. It isn't _our_ fault, indeed: you bore us, and--what can we do?--we
shrink as naturally and pardonably from voluntary boredom as from any
other voluntary suffering, and shirk an air redolent of ennui from the
same principle as we do an air redolent of diphtheria. Self-preservation
is a law of nature, and female society consists too exclusively of
milk-and-water, dashed here and there with citric acid of malice, to be
either a recherche or refreshing beverage to palates that have tasted
warmer spices or more wholesome tonics.
So I don't see much of my triad of sisters unless accidentally, but last
August I encountered them by chance at Vicq d'Azyr. Do you know Vicq
d'Azyr? No? All right? when it is known universally it will be spoilt;
it will soon be fashionable, dyspeptic, artificial, like the crowds that
will flock to it; its warm, bubbling springs will be gathered into long
upright glasses, and quaffed by yellow-visaged groups; brass bands will
bray where now the thrushes, orioles, and nightingales have the
woodlands to themselves; cavalcades of hired hacks will cut up its
thyme-covered turf, and young ladies will sketch in tortured outline and
miserable washes the glorious sweep of its mountains, the crimson tints
of its forests, the rush of its tumbling torrents, the golden gleam of
its southern sun. Vicq d'Azyr will be a Spa, and will be spoilt;
dyspepsia and bronchia, vanities and flirtations, cares and conquests,
physicians and intrigantes, real marchionesses puffing under asthma,
fictitious marquises strewing chaff for pigeons, monde and demi-monde,
grandes dames and dames d'industrie will float into it, a mighty army of
butterflies with a locust power of destruction: Vicq d'Azyr will be no
more, and in its stead we shall have--a Fashionable Bath. Vicq d'Azyr,
however, is free _yet_ from the hand of the spoiler, and is
charming--its vine-clad hills stretching up in sunny slopes; its little
homesteads nestling on the mountains' sides among the pines that load
the air with their rich heavy perfume; its torrents foaming down the
ravines, flinging their snowy spray far over the bows of arbutus and
mountain-ash that bend across the brinks of their rushing courses; its
dark-eyed peasant girls that dance at sunset under the linden-trees like
living incarnations of Florian's pastorals; its sultry brilliant summer
nights, when all is still, when the birds are sleeping among the
ilex-leaves, and the wind barely stirs the tangled boughs of the
woodland; when night is down on the mountains, wrapping hill and valley,
crag and forest in one soft purple mist, and the silence around is only
broken by the mystic music of the rushing waters, the soft whirr of the
night-birds' wings, or the distant chime of a village clock faintly
tolling through the air:----Caramba, messieurs! I beg your pardon! I
don't know why I poetize on Vicq d'Azyr. _I_ went there to slay, not to
sketch, with a rifle, not with a stylus, to kill izzards and chamois,
not to indite a poem a la mode, with double-barrelled adjectives, no
metre, and a "purpose;" nor to add my quota to the luckless loaded walls
of the Academy by a pre-Raphaelite landscape of arsenical green, with
the effete trammels of perspective gallantry disregarded, and trees
like Dr. Syntax's wife, "roundabout and rather squat," with just
two-dozen-and-seven leaves apiece for liberal allowance. I went to Vicq
d'Azyr, amongst other places, last August, for chamois-hunting with
Dunbar, of the Queen's Bays, taking up our abode at the Toison d'Or,
whither all artists, tourists, men who come for the sport, women who
come for its scenery, or invalids who come for its waters (whose
properties, _miserabile dictu!_ are just being discovered as a panacea
for every human ill--from a migraine to an "incurable pulmonary
affliction"), seek accommodation if they can have it, since it is the
only hotel in the place, though a very good one; is adorned with a
balcony running round the house, twined and buried in honeysuckle and
wild clematis, which enchants young ladies into instant promotion of it
into their sketch-books; and gives you, what is of rather more
importance, and what makes you ready to admire the clematis when, under
gastronomic exasperation, you might swear at it as a harbor for
tarantule--an omelette, I assure you, wellnigh as well cooked as you
have it at Mivart's or Meurice's.
At the Toison d'Or we took up our abode, and at the Toison d'Or we
encountered my two elder sisters, Constance and Agneta, travelling for
once on the same road, as they had left Paris together, and were
together going on to the fashionable capital of a fashionable little toy
duchy on the other side of the Rhine, when they should have finished
with the wilder beauties and more unknown charms of Vicq d'Azyr and its
environs. Each lady had her little train of husband, courier, valet,
lady's-maid, small dog, and giant jewel-box. I have put the list in the
inverse ratio of their importance, I believe. Your husband _versus_ your
jewel-box? Of course, my dear madam; absurd! What's the value of a
little simple gold ring against a dozen glittering circlets of diamonds,
emeralds, rubies, and garnets?
Each lady was bent on recruiting herself at Vicq d'Azyr after the toils
of the season, and of shining _apres_ with all the brilliance that a
fair share of beauty, good positions, and money, fairly entitled
them to expect, at the little Court of--we will call it
Lemongenseidlitz--denominated by its charming Duchess, Princess Helene
of Lemongenseidlitz-Phizzstrelitz, the loveliest and most volage of all
minor royalties. Each lady was strongly opposed to whatever the other
wished; each thought the weather "sultry" when the other thought it
"chilly," and _vice versa_. Each considered her own ailments "unheard-of
suffering, dear!--I could never make any one feel!" &c. &c.--and assured
you, with mild disdain, that the other's malady was "purely nervous,
entirely exaggerated, but she _will_ dwell on it so much, poor darling!"
Each related to you how admirably they would have travelled if _her_
counsel had been followed, and described how the other _would_ take the
direction of everything, _would_ confuse poor Chanderlos, the courier,
till he hardly knew where he was, and _would_ take the night express out
of pure unkindness, just because she knew how ill it always made her
(the speaker) feel to be torn across any country the whole night at that
dreadful pace; each was dissatisfied with everything, pleased with
nothing, and bored, as became ladies of good degree; each found the sun
too hot or the wind too cold, the mists too damp or the air too dry, and
both combined their forces to worry their ladies'-maids, find fault with
the viands, drive their lords to the registering of an oath never to
travel with women again, welcome us benignly, since they thought we
might amuse them, and smile their sunniest on Dunbar--he's
heir-prospective to the Gwynne Marquisate, and Lady Marqueterie, the
Saint, is not above keeping one eye open for worldly distinctions, while
Mrs. Albany Protocol, though a Radical, is, like certain others of the
ultra-Liberal party, not above a personal kow-towing before those
"ridiculous and ought-to-be exploded conservative institutions"--Rank
and Title.
At the Toison d'Or, I say, when, after knocking over izzards _ad
libitum_ in another part of the district, we descended one evening into
the valley where Vicq d'Azyr lies nestled in the sunset light, with the
pretty vendangeuses trooping down from the sloping vineyards, and the
cattle winding homewards down the hill-side paths, and the vesper-bells
softly chiming from the convent-tower rising yonder above its woods of
linden and acacia--at the Toison d'Or, just alighting with the
respective suites aforesaid, and all those portable embarrassments of
books, tiger-skin rugs, flacons of bouquet, travelling-bags warranted to
carry any and everything that the most fastidious can require en route
from Piccadilly to Peru, with which ladies do love to encumber and
embitter their own persons and their companions' lives, we met, as I
have told you, mesdames mes soeurs.
"What! Dear me, how very singular! Never should have dreamt of meeting
_you_; so much too quiet a place, I should have thought. No Kursaal
_here_? Come for sport--oh! Take Spes, will you! Poor little dear, he's
been barking the whole way because he couldn't see out of the window.
Ah, Major Dunbar, charmed to see you! What an amusing rencontre, is it
not?" And Lady Marechale, slightly out of temper for so eminent a
Christian at the commencement of her greeting, smoothed down her ruffled
feathers and turned smilingly on Dunbar. I have said he will be one day
Marquis of Gwynne.
"By George, old fellow! _you_ in this out-of-the-way place! That's all
right. Sport good, here? Glad to hear it. The deuce take me, if ever I
am lured into travelling in a _partie carree_ again."
And Marechale raised his eyebrows, and whispered confidentially to me
stronger language than I may commit to print, though, considering his
provocation, it was surely as pardonable as Uncle Toby's.
"The thing I dislike in this sort of hotels and places is the admixture
of people with whom one is obliged to come in contact," said Constance,
putting up her glass as she entered the long low room where the humble
table d'hote of the Toison d'Or was spread. Lady Marechale talks sweetly
of the equality of persons in the sight of Heaven, but I never heard her
recognize the same upon the soil of earth.
"Exactly! One may encounter such very objectionable characters! _I_
wished to dine in our own apartments, but Albany said no; and he is so
positive, you know! This place seems miserably primitive," responded
Agneta. Mrs. Protocol pets Rouges and Republicans of every country,
talks liberalism like a feminine Sieyes or John Bright, projects a
Reform Bill that shall bear the strongest possible family resemblance to
the Decrets du 4 Aout, and considers "social distinctions _odious_
between man and man;" but her practice is scarcely consistent with her
theory, seeing that she is about as tenacious and resentful of
objectionable contact as a sea-anemone.
"Who is that, I wonder?" whispered Lady Marechale, acidulating herself
in readiness, after the custom of English ladies when catching sight of
a stranger whom they "don't know."
"I wonder! All alone--how very queer!" echoed Mrs. Protocol, drawing her
black lace shawl around her, with that peculiar movement which announces
a woman's prescience of something antagonistic to her, that is to be
repelled _d'avance_, as surely as a hedgehog's transfer of itself into a
prickly ball denotes a sense of a coming enemy, and a need of caution
and self-protection.
"Who is that deucedly handsome woman?" whispered Marechale to me.
"What a charming creature!" echoed Dunbar.
The person referred to was the only woman at the table d'hote besides my
sisters--a sister-tourist, probably; a handsome--nay more, a beautiful
woman, about eight-and-twenty, distinguished-looking, brilliant, with a
figure voluptuously perfect as was ever the Princess Borghese's. To say
a woman looks a lady, means nothing in our day. "That young lady will
wait on you, sir," says the shopman, referring to the shopwoman who will
show you your gloves. "Hand the 'errings to that lady, Joe," you hear a
fishmonger cry, as you pass his shop-door, referring by his epithet to
some Mrs. Gamp or Betsy Priggs in search of that piscatory cheer at his
stall. Heaven forbid we should give the abused and degenerate title to
any woman deserving of the name! Generalize a thing, and it is vulgar.
"A gentleman of my acquaintance," says Spriggs, an auctioneer and
house-agent, to Smith, a collector of the water-rate. "A man I know,"
says Pursang, one of the Cabinet, to Greville Tempest, who is heir to a
Dukedom, and has intermarried with a royal house. The reason is plain
enough. Spriggs thinks it necessary to inform Smith, who otherwise might
remain ignorant of so signal a fact, that he actually does know a
gentleman, or rather what he terms such. Pursang knows that Tempest
would never suspect him of being _lie_ with men who were anything else;
the one is proud of the fine English, the other is content with the
simple phrase! Heaven forbid, I say, we should, nowadays, call any woman
a lady who is veritably such; let us fall back on the dignified,
definitive, courtly last-century-name of gentlewoman. I should be glad
to see that name revived; it draws a line that snobbissimi cannot pass,
and has a grand simplicity about it that will not attract Spriggs,
Smith, and Spark, and Mesdames S., leurs femmes!
Our sister-tourist, then, at the Toison d'Or, looked, to my eyes at the
least, much more than a "lady," she looked an _aristocrate jusqu'au bout
des ongles_, a beautiful, brilliant, dazzling brunette, with lovely
hazel eyes, flashing like a tartaret falcon's under their arched
pencilled eyebrows, quite an unhoped godsend in Vicq d'Azyr, where only
stragglers resort as yet, though--alas for my Arcadia--my sister's pet
physician, who sent them thither, is about, I believe, to publish a
work, entitled "The Water-Spring in the Wilderness; or, A Scamper
through Spots Unknown," which will do a little advertising of himself
opportunely, and send hundreds next season to invade the wild woodlands
and sunny valleys he inhumanly drags forth into the gas-glare of the
world.
The brilliant hazel eyes were opposite to me at dinner, and were, I
confess, more attractive to me than the stewed pigeons, the crisp
frog-legs, and the other viands prepared by the (considering we were in
the heart of one of the most remote provinces) really not bad cook of
the Toison d'Or. Lady Marechale and Mrs. Protocol honored her with that
stare by which one woman knows so well how to destroy the reputation of
another without speech; they had taken her measurement by some method of
feminine geometry unknown to us, and the result was apparently not
favorable to her, for over the countenances of the two ladies gathered
that expression of stiff dignity and virtuous disdain, in the assuming
of which, as I have observed before, they are inimitable proficients.
"Evidently not a proper person!" was written on every one of their
lineaments. Constance and Agneta had made up their minds with celerity
and decision as to her social status, with, it is to be presumed, that
unerring instinct which leads their sex to a conclusion so
instantaneously, that, according to a philosopher, a woman will be at
the top of the staircase of Reasoning by a single spring, while a man is
toiling slowly up the first few steps.
"You are intending to remain here some days, madame?" asked the fair
stranger, with a charming smile, of Lady Marechale--a pleasant little
overture to chance ephemeral acquaintance, such as a table d'hote
surely well warrants.
But the pleasant little overture was one to which Lady Marechale was far
too English to respond. With that inimitable breeding for which our
countrymen and women are continentally renowned, she bent her head with
stately stiffness, indulged herself with a haughty stare at the
offender, and turned to Agneta, to murmur in English her disgust with
the _cuisine_ of the really unoffending Toison d'Or.
"Poor Spes would eat nothing. Fenton must make him some panada. But
perhaps there was nothing better than goat's milk in the house! What
could Dr. Berkeley be thinking of? He described the place quite as
though it were a second Meurice's or Badischer Hof!"
A look of amusement glanced into the sparkling, yet languid eyes of my
opposite neighbor.
"English!" she murmured to herself, with an almost imperceptible but
sufficiently scornful elevation of her arched eyebrows, and a slight
smile, just showing her white teeth, as I addressed her in French; and
she answered me with the ease, the aplomb, the ever suave courtesy of a
woman of the world, with that polish which gives the most common
subjects a brilliance never their own, and that vivacity which confers
on the merest trifles a spell to amuse and to charm. She was certainly a
very lovely creature, and a very charming one, too; frank, animated,
witty, with the tone of a woman who has seen the world and knows it.
Dunbar adored her, at first sight; he is an inflammable fellow, and has
been ignited a thousand times at far less provocation. Marechale
prepared for himself fifty conjugal orations by the recklessness with
which, under the very eyes of madame, he devoted himself to another
woman. Even Albany Protocol, dull, somnolent, and superior to such
weaknesses, as becomes a president of many boards and a chairman of
many committees, opened his eyes and glanced at her; and some young
Cantabs and artists at the other end of the table stopped their own
conversation, envying Dunbar and myself, I believe, for our
juxtaposition with the _belle inconnue_; while my sisters sat trifling
with the wing of a pigeon, in voluntary starvation (they would have had
nothing to complain of, you see, if they had suffered themselves to dine
well!), with strong disapprobation marked upon their lineaments, of this
lovely vivacious unknown, whoever she might be, talking exclusively to
each other, with a certain expression of sarcastic disdain and offended
virtue, hinting far more forcibly than words that they thought already
the "very worst" of her.
So severe, indeed, did they look, that Dunbar, who is a good-natured
fellow, and thinks--and thinks justly--that Constance and Agneta are
very fine women, left me to discuss, Hoffmann, Heine, and the rest of
Germany's satirical poets, with my opposite neighbor, and endeavored to
thaw my sisters; a very difficult matter when once those ladies are
iced. He tried Paris, but only elicited a monosyllabic remark concerning
its weather; he tried Vicq d'Azyr, and was rewarded for his trouble by a
withering sarcasm on the unlucky Toison d'Or; he tried chit-chat on
mutual acquaintances, and the unhappy people he chanced to name were
severally dismissed with a cutting satire appended to each. Lady
Marechale and Mrs. Protocol were in one of those freezing and
unassailable moods in which they sealed a truce with one another, and,
combining their forces against a common foe, dealt out sharp, spherical,
hard-hitting little bullets of speech from behind the abatis in which
they intrenched themselves.
At last he, in despair, tried Lemongenseidlitz, and the ladies thawed
slightly--their anticipations from that fashionable little quarter were
couleur de rose. They would meet their people of the best _monde_, all
their dearest--that is of course their most fashionable--friends; the
dear Duchess of Frangipane, the Millamonts those charming people,
M. le Marquis de Croix-et-Cordon, Sir Henry Pullinger, Mrs.
Merivale-Delafield, were all there; that delightful person, too, the
Graf von Rosenlaeu, who amused them so much at Baden last year, was, as
of course Dunbar knew, Master of the Horse to the Prince of
Lemongenseidlitz-Phizzstrelitz; they would be well received at the
Court. Which last thing, however, they did not _say_, though they might
imply, and assuredly fully thought it; since Lady Marechale already
pictured herself gently awakening his Serene Highness to the spiritual
darkness of his soul in legitimatizing gaming-tables in his duchy, and
Mrs. Protocol already beheld herself closeted with his First Minister,
giving that venerable Metternich lessons in political economy, and
developing to him a system for filling his beggared treasury to
overflowing, without taxing the people a kreutzer--a problem which,
though it might have perplexed Kaunitz, Colbert, Pitt, Malesherbes,
Talleyrand, and Palmerston put together, offered not the slightest
difficulty to _her_ enterprising intellect. Have I not said that
Sherlock states women are at the top of the staircase while we are
toiling up the first few steps?
"The Duchess--Princess Helene is a lovely woman, I think. Winton saw her
at the Tuileries last winter, and raved about her beauty," said Dunbar,
finding he had hit at last on an acceptable subject, and pursuing it
with more zeal than discretion; for if there be one thing, I take it,
more indiscreet than another, it is to praise woman to woman.
Constance coughed and Agneta smiled, and both assented. "Oh yes--very
lovely, they believed!"
"And very lively--up to everything, I think I have heard," went on
Dunbar, blandly, unconscious of the meaning of cough, smile, and
assent.
"Very lively!" sighed the Saint.
"_Very_ lively!" smiled the Politician.
"As gay a woman as Marie Antoinette," continued Dunbar, too intent on
the truffles to pay en meme temps much heed to the subject he was
discussing. "She's copied the Trianon, hasn't she?--has fetes and
pastorals there, acts in comedies herself, shakes off etiquette and
ceremonial as much as she can, and all that sort of thing, I believe?"
Lady Marechale leaned back in her chair, the severe virtue and dignified
censure of a British matron and a modern Lucretia expressed in both
attitude and countenance.
"A second Marie Antoinette?--too truly and unfortunately so, I have
heard! Levity in _any_ station sufficiently reprehensible, but when
exhibited in the persons of those whom a higher power has placed in
exalted positions, it is most deeply to be deplored. The evil and
contagion of its example become incalculable; and even when, which I
believe her excusers are wont to assert of Princess Helene, it is merely
traceable to an over-gayety of spirit and an over-carelessness of
comment and censure, it should be remembered that we are enjoined to
abstain from every _appearance_ of evil!"
With which Constance shook out her phylacteries, represented by the
thirty-guinea bracade-silk folds of her skirt (a dress I heard her
describe as "very plain!--serviceable for travelling"), and glanced at
my opposite neighbor with a look which said, "You are evidently not a
proper person, but you hear for once what a proper person thinks!"
Our charming companion did hear it, for she apparently understood
English very well. She laughed a little--a sweet, low, ringing laugh--(I
was rather in love with her, I must say--I am still)--and spoke with a
slight pretty accent.
"True, madame! but ah! what a pity your St. Paul did not advise, too,
that people should not go by appearances, and think evil where evil is
not!"
Lady Marechale gave stare number two with a curl of her lip, and bent
her head stiffly.